In this four-part series, past
Roundtable President John Fazio reviews the current scholarship on
the question of whether John Wilkes Booth and his band of
conspirators, in their attempt to behead the Union government,
acted independently or under the direction of the Confederate
Secret Service and the top levels of the Confederate government,
up to and including Jefferson Davis.

Part 1 of this series (below)
reviews the nature of covert operations as generally practiced by
nations and as specifically practiced by the Confederate Secret
Service. Part 2 of this series suggests the motives the
Confederate government had for pursuing political assassination as
a war tactic and argues that the Lincoln plot was actually part of
a larger, official terror campaign waged by the Confederacy
against the Union. Part 3 of this series profiles Booth and traces
his activities leading up to the assassination. Part 4 wraps up
the analysis and addresses why all of it still matters 145 years
later.

From May, 1984, until his arrest in
November, 1985, Jonathan Pollard, a 31-year old head of the Middle
Eastern desk at the U.S. Navy’s Suitland, Maryland, Intelligence
Complex, spied for Israel. The classified documents that he gave
Israel access to would fill a space 10 ft. by 6 ft. by 6 ft. (360
cu.ft.). It was said that he did it for money and jewelry, but we
may be certain that he did it for political reasons as well. His
treachery is said to have caused one of the worst security disasters
in United States history. In 1987 he was convicted and
sentenced to life imprisonment. All efforts to have him paroled or
pardoned have failed.

What is significant is that from
the date of his arrest until 1998, Israel insisted that his
activities were a rogue operation. In 1998, then Prime Minister
Netanyahu admitted that it wasn’t so, that in fact Pollard was, at
all relevant times, an Israeli intelligence agent and that Israeli
intelligence had recruited him and handled him, i.e. supervised his
activities, until he was caught.

Does anyone suppose that United
States intelligence services, or any intelligence service in the
world, for that matter, bought the “rogue operation” explanation? Of
course not. Why not? Because all intelligence services know that the
business of intelligence is incredibly complex and sophisticated,
that it is imperative that agents follow orders at all times,
especially when major policies of a government can be and likely
will be affected by their actions, and that “rogue operations” are
all but unknown in the intelligence world.

So let it be with the assassination
of Abraham Lincoln. The notion that it was a rogue operation by a
disgruntled actor and a little band of cut-throats, mental retards
and cowards is ridiculous on its face, and the evidence that it was
not this is very strong to overwhelming.

One of the first principles of
covert operations is plausible denial, which is closely tied to the
principle of insulation, also known as buffering. We have all seen,
heard or read of handlers forewarning intelligence operatives that
if they are caught, so and so or such and such will deny any
knowledge of the operative or of his or her activity. The object is
to put as many layers as practical between those who issue the
orders and those who actually carry them out, known variously as
grunts, hatchet-men, fall guys and numerous other appellations.

Applied to the Confederacy, we may
place President Jefferson Davis at the very top with Attorney
General, later Secretary of War, later Secretary of State, Judah P.
Benjamin, just slightly below him, much like the relationship
between a captain and a first mate. The two had known each other and
worked well together for many years. Below these two were field officers
who could be relied upon to support intelligence initiatives and
covert operations, e.g. Robert E. Lee, Jubal Early, John S. Mosby
and doubtless others, though it must be said that some commanders in
the field were selective: they would sign on to some covert
operations, but not others.

Why name Lee, Early and Mosby
specifically? Because they were fighting in the eastern theater of
the war, close to the seat of Federal authority and power, where
they could therefore make a difference.

Below these was the
Confederate Secret Service in its truest sense, i.e. thousands of
trained agents placed in strategic locations in and out of the
country, ready, willing and able to receive orders from Richmond and
to implement them through the agency of subordinate operatives, who
in turn had their own subordinate operatives, i.e. the grunts,
who actually executed the orders by planting and detonating the
explosives, plunging the daggers and pulling the triggers, etc. In
this scenario, there are four layers of insulation separating the
very bottom from the very top. It is doubtful that there were more;
there may have been fewer; it may not have been so neatly
stratified. We shall probably never know. It seems probable that
many intelligence services in today’s world make use of more than
that, but the Confederate Secret Service, after all, was not the
CIA, the KGB or Mossad.

In these circumstances, a smoking
gun, i.e. a writing, in code or otherwise, indicating that A (Davis)
ordered E (Booth) to kill Lincoln, or B (Benjamin) ordered F
(Powell) to kill Seward, etc., will never be found because it almost
certainly never existed. Such an order, the execution of which would
rightly be called the crime of the century and which could have the
most profound military and political consequences, would never be
given directly to the lowest level operative, but would be given to
an intermediary, who would in turn pass it to another intermediary,
who would give it to the lowest level operative, thus assuring the
necessary insulation. Further, such an order would never be
committed to writing, but would be given orally and sent by courier.

Furthermore, it is known that Judah
Benjamin burned all records relating to the Confederate Secret
Service when Richmond was evacuated on April 3, 1865, and that
Jefferson Davis, on May 2, 1865, shortly before his capture and
after receiving word of Lincoln’s assassination, called his cabinet
together for the last time and ordered the destruction of many
official papers, so even what was written is now almost all
gone. Verbal testimony was nearly as unlikely to be found because
there were several layers of insulation to overcome to get to it,
and everyone was sworn to secrecy.

Most often, Booth’s minions had no
idea who Booth talked to and took orders from in Washington,
Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Montreal or Toronto. And
most often, Booth had little or no idea who these agents talked to
and took orders from in Richmond or elsewhere. And so on all the way
to the top. We must, therefore, content ourselves with
circumstantial evidence. But as every prosecutor knows,
circumstantial evidence isn’t bad and is often preferable to
eyewitness testimony.

No one will ever know exactly who
or what comprised the Confederate Secret Service. What is known is
that the Confederacy justified measures that fell outside the ambit
of so-called Christian or civilized warfare on the grounds that such
measures were necessary to compensate for the North’s superiority in
manpower and resources. What is also known is that Confederate
clandestine activities and covert operations fell under one or more
divisions of the Service, namely:

Foreign agents;

The Signal Corps (1,200 men);

The Torpedo Bureau (mines and
disguised bombs);

The Submarine Battery Service;

Espionage;

The Special and Secret Service
Bureau;

Secret Service Operations in
Canada.

Booth's Accomplices

L Powell

J
Surratt

D Herold

G Atzerodt

S Arnold

M
Surratt

M O'Laughlen

S Mudd

E Spangler

In the case of covert plans to
abduct or murder Lincoln, we may safely say that the projects were
under the overall control of Davis and Benjamin and that the action
team for one such plan comprised, at least, John Wilkes Booth, Lewis
Powell (aka Lewis Paine or Lewis Payne, “Reverend Wood” and
“Mosby”), George Atzerodt, David Herold, Mary Surratt, John Surratt,
Michael O’Laughlen, Samuel Arnold, Edmund Spangler and Dr. Samuel
Mudd. It may seem odd to lump Mudd, a physician, with the motley
band of misfits, but the fact is that Mudd was part of Confederate
intelligence throughout the war, met with Booth on at least three
occasions before the assassination and greatly assisted him in his
escape. It is arguable that Booth’s stop at Mudd’s home after the
assassination was occasioned only by the fact that he had broken his
leg when he jumped to the stage and therefore needed medical care,
but it is just as likely, perhaps more so, that he would have
stopped irrespective of his condition, inasmuch as Mudd was one of a
line of Confederate agents that stretched from Washington to
Richmond through lower Maryland and Virginia, agents whom Booth
would also meet with as he made his way south. Spangler was on the
edge, and his sentence reflected that fact. Nevertheless, he played
a role that was sufficient, in my opinion, to include him as part of
the team.

The head of the group, of course,
was Booth (Powell called him “Captain”), though it is known that
John Surratt had direct contact with Benjamin and perhaps Davis, in
Richmond. Booth appears to have been a middle-level operative as
well as a triggerman.

Were there
others? Without question. Powell said to Assistant Secretary of War,
Major Thomas T. Eckert, who questioned him, “All I can say about
this is that you (United States prosecutors) have not got the
one-half of them.” That fact alone, i.e. that the conspiracy
involved a substantial number of people, is probative of complicity
of the Confederate government. A rogue operation by an individual or
a small number of individuals, though unlikely, at least has some
plausibility, but the greater the number of participants, the less
likely it is that they can be operating without the supervision of,
and control by, the highest political authority in the Confederacy. Indeed, after the turn of the century, more
than 35 years after the fact, Richard M. Smoot, a Confederate
officer, admitted his involvement in the plot to kidnap or
assassinate Lincoln and implied that two other previously unknown
men were involved, namely Joseph Eli Huntt and Frederick Stone, the
latter having died in 1899. Interestingly, Stone was Dr. Mudd’s and
David Herold’s defense counsel in the trial of the conspirators.

Is it too much to believe that
Davis and Benjamin would plot such a dastardly deed as the murder of
the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the
Secretary of War and the Lieutenant General of the Union armies? It
shouldn’t be. Desperate men do desperate things. Davis, of course,
later denied having anything to do with the assassination, saying
that he would a thousand times have preferred dealing with Lincoln
than with Johnson. In so saying, he did what almost anyone in his
circumstances would have done: he lied. Further, this particular remark is
disingenuous, because the plan called for the murder of Johnson too.

More telling is Davis's response
upon first receiving news of the assassination: “If it were to be
done, it were better if it were well done,” he said. Later, in
response to John Breckenridge’s remark that the assassination was
unfortunate for the people of the South “at this time,” Davis said:
“Well, General, I don’t know. If it were to be done at all it were
better that it were well done, and if the same had been done to Andy
Johnson, the beast, and to Secretary Stanton, the job would have
been complete.” It is very significant, and indeed probative of his
complicity, that Davis found fault not with the murder of his
political counterpart, but with the fact that Vice President Johnson
and Secretary of War Stanton had not also been murdered.

“All I can say
about this is that you (Federal prosecutors) have
not got the one-half of them.”

- Lewis Powell,
Booth's co-conspirator
and Seward's assailant,
to Asst. Sec. of War
Maj. Thomas T. Eckert,
following his capture

Such was the testimony of Lewis F.
Bates, Superintendent of the Southern Express Company for the State
of North Carolina, given at the trial of the conspirators. Bates was
present when Davis received the news, by telegram, and later
entertained both Davis and Breckenridge at his home.

Still further, it is known that at
least two Confederate soldiers, one of whom was said to be a
Northerner serving in a Georgia regiment, wrote to Davis
volunteering to murder Lincoln and other Northern leaders. One of
the letters, with its Presidential endorsement, was discovered among
Confederate records after the war (the few that escaped the flames)
and was considered proof of Davis’s sanctioning of political
assassination.

It is very significant, too, that
Benjamin, as previously said, burned everything relating to the
Secret Service and then fled to England under a false name after the
Confederacy collapsed. It was a tortuous journey, full of hazards
and near-misses with death, but he did make it, soon carved out a
successful life in his adopted country and died a natural death in
1884, in Paris, at the age of 72. Obviously, he did not want to be
tried, which can only mean that he had serious doubts that he could
avoid the hangman. It is not necessary to ask “Why?”; the answer is
perfectly clear: he was up to his eyeballs in terror plots and plots
to decapitate Northern leadership by abduction and/or murder and he
supposed, probably correctly, that Federal prosecutors would nail
him for it, but would not nail Davis because Davis had plausible
deniability, because many Confederate agents were prepared to
sacrifice or perjure themselves or to engage in legal gymnastics to
preserve the illusion of Davis’s innocence and because Davis was, and would likely continue to be,
a Southern icon whom the Federal Government would be loathe to
prosecute, which turned out to be true.

Furthermore, the law
provided that treason trials had to be conducted in the state in
which the crime occurred, in Davis’s case, Virginia, where he was so
popular that it would have been nearly impossible to find a jury
that would convict him. Benjamin and Davis surely knew this.

It is
also significant that Davis kept a coal bomb on his desk, the very
same kind that was used by Confederate agents to sink more than 60
Union gunboats and other watercraft and which may well have been
used to sink the Sultana with a loss of
nearly 2,000 lives.

But what did the Confederate
leadership hope to gain by the decapitation of the Federal
leadership?

The second article in this
series suggests the motives the Confederate government had for
pursuing political assassination as a war tactic and argues that
the Lincoln plot was actually part of a larger, official terror
campaign waged by the Confederacy against the Union.

Jefferson
Davis:CSA President and complicit in the attempted decapitation of Union
leadership by kidnapping or assassination.

Judah
P. Benjamin:CSA Secretary of State and complicit in the attempted
decapitation of Union leadership by kidnapping or
assassination.

James A. Seddon:CSA Secretary of War and complicit in the attempted
decapitation of Union leadership by kidnapping or
assassination.

John Wilkes
Booth:Confederate Secret Service Agent, leader of one action
team to decapitate Union leadership and assassin of President
Lincoln.

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